City Remnants is the third collective installation by BRUT, a Belgian design collective comprising Charlotte Jonckheer, Linde Freya Tangelder, Nel Verbeke, Ben Storms, and Bram Vanderbeke. Each edition that BRUT produces is both a continuation of how the 5 designers' practices converge and a fresh repositioning of what that convergence can produce. The third edition takes the contemporary city as its central motif.
The installation works on 2 levels simultaneously. At one level it is an ode to the city's archetypal forms and functions, an acknowledgment of the visual and spatial language that urban environments generate. At another, it is an investigation into the relationships between the public and the domestic, the collective and the individual. These are the same tensions that define how cities are actually experienced by the people who live in them, and City Remnants translates those tensions into object and spatial form.
BRUT's approach across all 3 editions has been to create installations that contain and display individual works from each designer while simultaneously proposing jointly designed objects and structures. The result in each case is a setting where individual authorship and collective production coexist rather than one subordinating the other. City Remnants represents the furthest development of that model to date.
